[kayoone]

Gigabit internet is quite widely available through different cable providers in Germany nowadays. Also the country side seems to be moving up, the very rural place where I grew up (and where my mom still lives) had a max of 2Mbps DSL for the last 20(!) years and now the whole area is being upgraded to fibre and will enjoy 10/1Gbps by the end of the year!

[larusso]

I moved into a newly build house in 2014 and was shocked to learn that all the houses only had basic copper telephone lines and Sat-TV. The whole field was empty and they had to do the groundwork for the copper cables anyway. I was shocked when the Telekom person, who connected my then 16MBit/s ADSL contract I had to move with, told me that the next TAL (connection point; Teilnehmer Anschluss Leitung, I don’t know the correct English term) was 5km out and that I will only able to receive 10MBit/s max. Netflix HD was blurry and browsing while streaming impossible. I hear news that it gets better and that rural places finally get faster speeds but as long as I live where I live now I’m bound to VDSL or find enough neighbors who would be willing to ship in to get a Fibre connection.

[jamiek88]

What a pain in the arse!

Just fyi as I know you aren’t a native speaker, it’s ‘chip in’, if you were native I’d assume a typo, probably is for you too, but it’s a phrase easy to mishear and when I was learning a second language I appreciated these corrections.

[pph]

The drawback is that cable it is a shared medium, so it can be quite bad when demand is high (in the evening) and the upload bandwidth usually is very low.

[microtonal]

Lived in Germany for 5 years and cable internet was generally terrible. We had 200/20MBit. But the actual upstream would often be 1MBit. Downstream was better but at many times not great. There would also be regular outages, that would take hours to solve. The only alternative was VDSL with a maximum downstream of 50MBit.

We moved back to NL and have 1GBit fiber, and there has been a short outage once in three years. I know that there are a still a lot of addresses without fiber, but when I last checked the stats, about 50% of the addresses has the possibility to get a fiber subscription. Heck, even my parents who live in a small rural town have fiber.

[kayoone]

Yeah the classic argument, but at some point every internet connection becomes a shared medium. It really depends on how the network is setup and where the fibre backhauls start. If the building has older wiring which can only support 1Gbps and you have a bunch of high bandwidth users, then yes it can affect your bandwidth more than using other technologies.

[aidenn0]

Interesting. In populous areas of the US they use HFC so the cable to your house only services a few buildings, with the neighborhood having a fiber optic back-haul that is shared, but much faster

[krzyk]

We have similar situation in Poland. I live in rural area, but quite close to bigger city and enjoy 1Gbps for the last 4 or 5 years.

I wonder how the upgrade might look considering that 10Gbps hardware is quite expensive (and house cabling might need upgrading) and 2.5Gbps/5Gbps is quite new and hard to find router or laptop dock/hub supporting it.

[Sakos]

Still quite expensive though, especially compared to almost every other country out there. It's insanity.